Dr Bruce Stevenson

Adjunct Senior Lecturer - Faculty of Medicine and Health; School of Psychology

Bruce Stevenson

Phone: +61 2 6773 2565

Email: bstevens@une.edu.au

Qualifications

B.Sc. (Honours) Monash University; Ph.D. Monash University

Teaching Areas

Supervision Areas

Cognitive Psychology (e.g., language processing, memory, perception, reasoning)

Research Interests

How is it that the lines on this page can induce your present meaningful experience? What is this thing called mind that allows you to have conscious experiences, to act, and to identify yourself as separate from the rest of the world? Presumably the chair on which you are sitting, or floor on which you are standing, is not similarly endowed. At a general level, these are the sorts of questions that I am interested in: What is mental activity, and what conditions need to prevail in order for it to occur? At a more specific level, language processing offers a rich medium through which to investigate these issues: What mental activity is happening at this very moment, involving the use of different types of information, which results in your current comprehension of what I have written? The products of language processing are available to your conscious perusal in a working memory: Do the properties of working memory constrain that which we can be aware of? If so, what are the implications? Both language processes and working memory are aspects of cognition common to most humans, but what happens when there is an apparent breakdown in cognitive processing? A phenomenon such as autism might be the result. Investigations into autism offer better treatment for those afflicted, and provide insights into aspects of ourselves that we tend to take for granted.

Publications

Fraser, H. and Stevenson, B. (2014). The power and persistence of contextual priming: More cautions regarding use of police transcripts to aid jurors’ perception of poor quality covert recordings presented as evidence in criminal trials. International Journal of Evidence and Proof, 18(3), 205-229.

Khlentzos, D.M. & Stevenson, B. (2011). True to the power of one? Cognition, argument and reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 82-83.

Fraser, H.B., Stevenson, B. & Marks, A. (2011). Interpretation of a crisis call: Persistence of a primed perception of a disputed utterance. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 18(2), 261-292.